-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
The Food Stamp program, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), is a target for Republicans who voted to cut $40 billion from the program. The reasons that Republicans have given are so divorced from reality that one can reasonably suspect their true motivations lie elsewhere. The primacy of fantasy in the GOP has been recently evidenced by Michele Bachmann who sees signs of the End Times, a wished-for global apocalypse.
First up on the list of fantasies is by Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Arkansas) who said “the food stamp program [grew] exponentially because the government continues to turn a blind eye to a system fraught with abuse.” In reality, SNAP participation closely tracks the long term unemployment rate, prolonged by Republicans. The sale of SNAP benefits for cash, called “trafficking,” has been cut to $1 in every $100 of SNAP benefits. The reality is a one percent abuse rate, the fantasy is SNAP is “fraught” with abuse.
The next fantasy is that able-bodied people are getting food stamps instead of working. The reality is that 83% of all SNAP benefits go to households that include a child, an elderly person, or a disabled person. The average individual gets $133 a month in SNAP benefits. It is ridiculous to imagine that a person is going to quit their job for $133 a month that can only be spent on food, but Republicans bear ridicule well.
The next fantasy is that SNAP recipients use their benefits to buy cigarettes and alcohol. The SNAP program uses Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards, similar to debit cards, that can be used in the supermarket checkout line only to purchase food. The Right likes to point to Jackie Whiton, a Peterborough, New Hampshire, store cashier who declined to accept an EBT card as payment for a pack of cigarettes. In reality, the EBT card contained state assistance money, not SNAP benefits, which can be used to purchase tobacco products. The store she worked for has a policy of accepting EBT cash benefits. In reality, Whiton was fired for violating the company’s policies.
The Republican war on programs that benefit Americans in need isn’t based on a philosophical commitment to small government. If it were, the $20 billion in farm subsidies, a welfare program for agribusiness, would be near the top of their hit list. According to a Greenberg report, the Republicans “are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority.” The report goes on to say that the “race issue [is] very much alive.” There you have it. Obama is taking their money and giving it to “Those People.”
H/T: Dave Johnson, Paul Krugman, Dottie Rosenbaum, Amanda Marcotte, Brian Tashman, WMUR.
@michaelmca66 – Oh and Mohammed al-Habib can give two sh*ts about “paper trails” on his soda-pop purchases. I’ve seen them go to Dollar Stores, Big Box Stores, etc. and lay down “cash” for large cases of soda-pop to resell back at al-Habib’s Convenience Store. Who’s going to check their hand on paper trails? I don’t think the FDA is setup to enforce soda-pop paper trail enforcement. That would be a new department FDA Division 6? (MIB movie reference) 🙂
SOT asks: then how can you conclude that the two particles are moving in unison?
Entanglement is not about movement.
SOT asks: So far the experiments like Alain Aspect et al have only shown SE from several kilometers apart suggesting that a hidden energy heretofore unknown to man may be at play which causes the SE.
No, the equations predict the quantum entanglement, and predict it will last until disturbed by a future interaction; and when we measure widely separated particles we do indeed observe quantum entanglement. It was not something we observed and then predicted would last forever, it was a consequence of equations based on observations (like in the two slit experiments) that was testable on the scale of kilometers and turned out to be verified on that scale. Because the entire quantum theory has been rigorously tested in thousands of aspects and thousands of experiments, there is only the slightest of doubt the equations as they currently exist are accurate and therefore entanglement is permanent (until disturbed). Changing the theory to make entanglement limited by time or distance would most likely make them non-predictive on hundreds of other experiments that verified them in their current state.
If you would like to try, I suggest you undertake a Master’s in Physics with a Quantum focus; with a Bachelor’s in Mathematics. That should provide you with the skill level necessary to play the “what if” games you seem to be interested in.
SOT says: I admit SE is mind-blowing and would make an excellent sub-space communications system rivaling Star Trek’s sub-space comm system.
As it exists, it won’t ever do that. It is not possible to pass information faster than the speed of light. I suggest you think of it this way: I flip a coin in the dark, catch it, and I put it in a holder so what is facing us is either heads or tails. Neither of us knows what that is, because it is dark. But the holder is rigged with a mirror system behind it, so when you see the coin, to the left of it is the image of its reverse. When I turn the lights on what you will see is either heads on the left and tails or the right, or tails on the left and heads on the right. We don’t know which, but we know they are “entangled” because of the way mirrors work; you will not see two heads, and you will not see two tails.
I also cannot pass you any information; the coin flip is random and I do not know which of the two cases you will see, and in quantum mechanics there is no way (as far as we know) of controlling the “coin flip” to know what we will measure (the lights coming on is the “measurement”) without destroying the entanglement. To make your Star Trek communicator we would have to entangle pairs and then separate each from its partner by light years, and then somehow use this random sequence of heads and tails to pass a message, with no further communication (which can only occur at light speed). It isn’t possible.
SOT says: However, I think that SE goes to support that atheism is all wet. Atheism is (IMHO) the FOTPT at work. Or basically atheists being wholly misinformed about the concept of God and the Bible by well meaning but wholly fallible Fundamentalist Christians.
On the contrary, atheists are typically far more informed about the Bible than non-atheists. Most atheists (and I am acquainted with many dozens) have read either the entire Bible or far more than the average avowed Christian; in many cases reading the Bible is what made them atheists.
We are not deluded or misled or misinformed about some concept of God, we have done our homework and concluded the Bible is hack fiction, incoherent, self-contradictory, petty, criminal and simply untrustworthy. So we dismiss it, as a work of Man with no reason to believe a word of it.
Re-interpret it all you want, you can refine your concept till the sun rises, but there is no basis for belief in anything supernatural at all, and until you have falsifiable proof you are just fantasizing.
As we atheists say: Do you believe Zeus is real and exists? Or Krishna, or the Annunaki? Because we all have Gods we don’t believe in, we atheists just believe in one less God than the Christians.
@bigfatmike – Yes Google does cache some downed websites. Sometimes it’s (▼) there and other times websites kill it with the meta-tags like No-Cache and No-Robots and other tags. They don’t want to be cached. You used to also be able go to “The Memory Hole” too but “they” hacked it to death in 2009 (i.e. too many inconvenient truths?). However, I cut and pasted the story at October 14, 2013 at 4:45 pm above.
@Mike Spindell – Again I am amazed at your back-story. The “Chessmen”? I wonder if they chose that name not because of the board game but because of Caryl “Genius” Chessman? He look so much like Robert DeNiro. They should do a movie about him.
Genovese Family? Wow… I just want to avoid that situation at all costs. You’ll be amazed how one can run into these people in everyday life without really trying. Once I was at a Native American Casino boxing match and these “good fellas” were EVERYWHERE. Pinkie-rings, Hickey Freeman suits, and Cuban cigars puffing away. And of all people I ran into the famous Italian-American actor Mike Starr and I offended him with a stereotypical remark about him playing mobsters in the movies. Go figure! “Hey not for nuttin’ go are whut’ you are – capisch?” 🙂
@bigfatmike and @leejcaroll – I appreciate your overly simplistic view of what is actually correct on your part. Yes SNAP fraud is NOT rampant just as you suggest. Why is that?
Because, the intrinsic method of how the program works mitigates fraud. That’s why it was invented. OK let’s say you SELL your SNAP card to a unscrupulous convenience store owner or crack-head on the street. What does that afford you? Nothing! Why? Because how do you recoup your losses next month?
You’d have to give the bad guy your PIN #. Not only does the USDA mainframe see that something is amiss by your now strange shopping patterns but now that same location is processing more and more SNAP cards for the same shoddy malnutritioning merchandise.
Now you have no groceries only some cash to go buy beer, smokes, and mostly dope. What do you eat now? McDonald’s food? So next month when you get your next allotment (on the 2nd of the month), you have to go get more cash from the bad guy or you’ll report him to your DSS worker or have the PIN # changed? No that won’t raise any red-flags (sarcasm).
I don’t think the naysayers know how BIG BROTHER-ish the USDA system really is. Their mainframes are huge and can process trend-analysis just like an NSA computer can do. They also can put boots on the ground via state employee investigators or private sub-contractors like Nick and me. And tell me how we would miss getting tons of video on crack-heads using someone else’s EBT card. You forget that the investigator is feed LIVE encrypted data-feeds from the store’s POS system to his/her PDA via a WiMax connection.
(Mr. Obama carries one too: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/obama-may-carry-top-secret-pda/?_r=0 – called a Sectera Edge by General Dynamics )
So all of you Republicans (and Tea Baggers) can stop your screed about unchecked out-of-control welfare fraud and poor people should be penalized for it. Big Brother is watching and the guilty will not go unpunished. And I’ll bet the really bad SNAP traffickers voted for GWB and Sara Palin too.
Ya’ know Nick, regarding your allegation that Mike was driven away and you were working on getting him to return I have to tell you that you are a big part of the problem. This is a blawg that has a lot of lawyers and a smattering of scientists and teachers. They like proofs (and maths) and they argue much of the time from a technical bias. I appreciate that. There are external things, like case cites, studies, historical references that are the analogue to Hoyle’s book of rules. They don’t do ‘soft’. It can get dogmatic real fast. Those are the rules of the road.
That’s also why I occasionally qualify my postings with disclaimers that I got nothing -no cites, no studies, no nothing but personal observation over time and my own skewed/occasionally paranoid opinion so accept it for what it’s worth (FWIW). The point being that I came to a legal blawg, I’m not going to b***h too much because that’s how the discussion is conducted. That wouldn’t make sense. Some new posters do get short shrift and shouldn’t. I stuck around because I could learn things in a subject that interested me. I never liked teachers that denigrated me up front for my ignorance alone when I posed a question. It’s better to be ignored.
But I could always spot the people in a class or workplace that were s**t disturbers even if they were thinly disguising it as offered advice, praise or friendship.
You littered this thread and others with throwaway lines aimed at newcomers talking/warning about this blawg being ruled by a cabal of elitists and stated that commenting here was running a gauntlet. You praised ‘strength’ and implied it was needed to visit here. I thought about calling you on it last night and should have. YOU are a big part of the problem by characterizing participation on this blawg as an ‘us’ against ‘them’ exercise instead of a generally civil dialectic. You aren’t the first to do that but you’re the one doing it now.
Bob K’s initial response to Tina (i think it was) about changing her name was way more harsh than it needed to be. IMO. She didn’t deserve that. But you ride in with the ‘gauntlet’ remarks. Which may have primed her reaction,
then his. Unfortunate all around.
You make a really unpleasant attack on Mike S. behind what was a pretty innocuous general remark, (You jump in an on Mike S. for anything and everything dude, You bait him relentlessly, it’s a thing, and obvious.), continue denigrating people and go into a longish, negative posting about guest bloggers to someone. I came back today and started reading from the bottom up and stopped at “You folks are elitist, pompous and exclusionary. And, you’re proud of it.” attached to what appears to be a made up quote.
You just won’t let it, whatever the personal ‘it’ might be, rest. You need to be making those comments to the people you are pi**ed at, not about them to third parties and using their words to attach your vitriol to. It’s destructive. It’s a ‘let’s see if I can start a fight/poison-the-well thing. It’s very apparent in this thread. You need to knock that crap off.
Just to be clear: this isn’t the beginning of an argument, It’s what I observed and how I feel about it. It’s this thread instead of some other thread because this one just pissed me off the most. It’s a stand alone observation, not a solicitation for discussion. FWIW.
@Bron – Holographic Universe (or HU) ? Atheism? My theory it’s all based on what I call “root-theorum-error” or RTE. In the legal world they would call it “Fruit of the poisonous tree” (or FOTPT). The roots of both subjects above have been tainted by basic fundamental misunderstandings of the subject matter.
HU is basically a gross misunderstanding of Albert Einstein’s (et al) “spooky entanglement” (or SE). IOW if you can not duplicate the experiment fully (actually have verification from BILLIONS of miles (or even multiple parsecs) apart) then how can you conclude that the two particles are moving in unison? So far the experiments like Alain Aspect et al have only shown SE from several kilometers apart suggesting that a hidden energy heretofore unknown to man may be at play which causes the SE. I admit SE is mind-blowing and would make an excellent sub-space communications system rivaling Star Trek’s sub-space comm system.
However, I think that SE goes to support that atheism is all wet. Atheism is (IMHO) the FOTPT at work. Or basically atheists being wholly misinformed about the concept of God and the Bible by well meaning but wholly fallible Fundamentalist Christians.
So IMO there are explanations for both phenomena that have nothing to do with magic nor Holographic Universes.
What leejcaroll said.
Beldar 1, October 13, 2013 at 7:19 am
From my objective observation, being a foreigner from France, the feelings generated by the stampless food give away program in America arise in the checkout line…
Well being from FRANCE Beldar (wink wink) I think you will appreciate this:
If extraterrestrial biological entities do exist on other planets then they probably are not visiting us as you seem to suggest with your cyber-persona (i.e. SNL-style).
One would think that just like in the James Cameron movie AVATAR they have not even achieved artificial flight like we did in the later part of the 19th century. In the movie the indigenous population used quasi-pteradons for flight. However, for food sources they depended on woodland gathering and maybe some agrarian means.
We Earthlings still solely practice that daily in our rain forests of the world. It stands to reason that the natural state for man is to be agrarian and woodland gatherers. The reason why we quasi-evolved toward supermarkets (and other modern conveniences like atomic energy) was arguably from esoteric meta*physical (not metaphysics!) “outside” influences making us lazy and hyper-dependent on others.
I get your point that we need to revisit the old ways as soon than we think we may be thrown back to that lifestyle by circumstances outside our control. We take too much for granted. Farmers are good but we need to learn their trade-craft and quickly. Wouldn’t hurt to live with some survivalists for a month too. To see how the woodland gathering thing works. I have never gutted a deer or skinned a fish. But I know I should learn – and soon…
Why the urgency? I guess you haven’t been watching the news. The “Ships of Kittim” are multiplying like rabbits. There are literally armadas out there now waiting to start WW4. I can only shudder to think what’s next.
Bron: I am an atheist; I don’t know what that has to do with anything. I am also conversant in mathematics. I don’t believe in the holographic universe, but the mathematics is sound and based on accepted assumptions about the nature of information; in this case the idea is that the particle physics information contained in a volume can be represented by a mathematical projection to the surface of a sphere containing that volume; and therefore —- vice versa.
But the vice-versa part doesn’t have to be taken as a fact, and as always may depend on infinities that I do not believe exist in practice. Namely, I don’t think things can be infinitely small, infinitely precise, etc. I see no reason to subscribe to the “we are literally projections” view as opposed to the far more mild “modeling” notion that “our 3-D interactions can theoretically be computed as the projections of interactions of entities on an enclosing sphere.”
I personally think infinities are the problem with the resolution of quantum physics and general relativity; GR depends upon infinitely tiny forces, and as far as we can tell in the standard model, all forces are quantized. This fact of quantization is what led to quantum theory in the first place, as the explanation for the radiation we see from a black body: Using pre-quantum physics without quantization, the computations produce infinities and make no sense.
For that reason, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and other reasons, I do not subscribe to the sci-fi notion that a black hole collapses to an infinitely dense point. I do think black holes exist in the sense of gravity overwhelming the escape velocity of light, I just do not think they collapse to a point, cause wormholes through space, etc. I do not think space is infinitely bendable; I think space itself is quantized.
How does one blow smoke out the behind?
Easy! Like this… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8PCHRMJ23Y
How come so many poor people in this world smoke tobacco?
Well the US DoE says that it has something to do with GABA:
“With long-term exposure to nicotine, some nicotinic cholinergic receptors become desensitized but some do not. As a result, GABA-mediated inhibitory tone diminishes while glutamate-mediated excitation persists, increasing excitation of dopaminergic neurons and enhancing responsiveness to nicotine.”
So since “poor people” go after the “low-hanging fruit” (i.e. cigarettes), they are easy targets for the tobacco industry (i.e. government-sanctioned-murderers?) The high-hanging-fruit like mj and cocaine are for people with money like President GW Bush who was caught doing lines at Camp David by his USSS team. However, GABA is still the same with all of them – DOPAMINE release!
There was a movie once in where an alien renegade came to our planet to collect dopamine for the alien black market on his planet. He killed Earthlings to drain it from their brains. Forgot the name of that movie.
…exported to other planets…
Well NASA is pretty much positive live exists on a certain moon of Saturn that they sent billions of US tax payer dollars there to find out recently. Come to find out the world has oceans, continents, clouds, etc. just like us. But they supposedly didn’t find the life-forms yet. But they are still orbiting that world still looking for clues.
One big clue is that the world is drenched in METHANE. Only 2 things generate methane and then the Sun destroys it with UV rays. That’s volcanoes and life. There are no volcanoes there. So something biological is generating it.
And we Earthlings generate our own noxious gasses with cigarettes? Is that because we’re actually aliens like Beldar? 😉
bfm,
It’s simple. All I did was Google “usda snap trafficking report.” Instead of clicking on the link, I clicked on the little green arrow below it. That brought up a box with the word “cached.” Then I clicked on “cached”–which brought me to the USDA report.
“Instead of clicking on the link, I clicked on the little green arrow below it.”
That’s pretty slick. I never even noticed the green arrow before.
tony c:
I am assuming, based on Gene’s post, that I dont know what it is. So I was asking him to please explain it to me.
I read an article, in my attept to understand, that said the idea of a holographic universe is probably not correct based on recent findings.
The idea that our universe is byts of information projected from some 2D space is rather hard to wrap your mind around.
I thought you were an atheist?
To the tune of “When You’re a Jet,” from West side Story
“When you’re a Chessman you’re a Chessman all the way..from you’re first English opening to your last en passant.”
Bron: Then please explain it [a holographic universe].
Shouldn’t you explain it? You brought it up, you claimed people that believe in it are in trouble, so apparently you think you know something about it. The math behind that idea is solid, so why don’t you explain to us why you think those people are in trouble?
Fox Misleadingly Hypes 1.3 Percent Fraud In Food Stamp Program
Blog ››› August 19, 2013
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/19/fox-misleadingly-hypes-13-percent-fraud-in-food/195462
Excerpt:
Fox News misleadingly hyped a minor rise in food stamp fraud in an attempt to demonize the program, failing to note it has one of the lowest fraud rates of all federal programs, fraud remains at historically low levels, and the slight increase in fraud reflects an increase in overall enrollment in food supplement initiatives.
On August 15, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a new report on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, which found that benefit trafficking — “when SNAP recipients sell their benefits for cash to food retailers, often at a discount” — had risen slightly from 1.0 percent of total SNAP benefits in 2006-2008 to just 1.3 percent in 2009-2011.
Co-host Brian Kilmeade hyped this minor difference on the August 19 edition of Fox & Friends, focusing on the change in fraud levels while failing to report how little fraud was found in the program:
KILMEADE: 30 percent. That’s how many more Americans, according to a new study, are selling food stamps for cash illegally. No, Steve, that’s not legal. Nearly 48 million people receive food stamps. The program costs $80 billion a year.
In fact, according to the USDA, SNAP benefit trafficking has “remained relatively steady at approximately one cent on the dollar,” and the program “continues to have one of the lowest fraud rates for Federal programs.” Furthermore, rates of trafficking have declined since the 90s and the current rate of trafficking remains near historic lows…
According to the USDA, a “substantial portion” of the minor rise in benefit trafficking “is due to the growth in the program,” as the total number of SNAP benefits jumped during the recent economic crisis from $36 billion in 2008 to $73 billion in 2011. The USDA also noted that the rise is partly due to the increased number of small and medium-sized businesses which are authorized to accept SNAP benefits, as small retailers accounted for 85 percent of the fraudulent redemptions identified.
The USDA has taken steps to decrease the small amount of SNAP benefit fraud, including permanently disqualifying over 1000 retailers that engaged in trafficking, suspending retailers suspected of serious fraud, more frequently reviewing high-risk retailers, and cracking down on fraud online.
Some people, like George Costanza, join the Van Buren Boys, some join The Chessman. I’ve read tales of being bullied and called “queer” which were believable and caused some empathy from me. I’m trying to reconcile those tales w/ the heroin shooting, gangbanging Chessman. Did you folks tangle w/ the Chinese Checkers in Chinatown? I heard the Parcheesi Punks in the Bowery were mofo’s.
Some Dicks are private, others are just Dicks, compensating for their deficiency with bluster and fantasy.
PMJ: Or a better metaphor, don’t take a swing and expect nobody to swing back.